Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not the type to demand affirmation or to worry that I'll be forgotten. I'm more the type to dare the world to forget me.
I ask myself when I see a new album: 'Is this an album that they needed to make, or do they need to just keep making albums?'
I want so many artists that I care about to go away and grow up, and have been amazed at how hard that is for some people to do.
If they told me I couldn't leave the radius of six miles from my house, I really wouldn't care. There's nowhere I really want to go.
Sometimes I turn the TV just below where you can hear it and write down what I think they might be saying by the mumbles and rhythms.
I try every day and every night to find a movie or a TV show that I can watch, but I just can't make it past ten minutes of anything.
I don't have any desire to be in a relationship with anyone else, and I do feel like I'm on the other side of my career of being a Lothario.
My only advice would be to someone right now, is if you're in a position in your life where you need to make a change, this is the best time.
Obviously there was the idea that we could sell more records if we played live, but I guess I didn't care enough to sell more records to do that.
I don't have religion or culture. I don't have anything I can believe in when I'm really scared. When I play the songs, I feel the fear disappear.
I read Henry Miller's 'Nexus,' 'Sexus' and 'Plexus' the summer after I graduated from college. It cemented my decision to spurn any and all careers.
The overlap between Pavement's fan base and people who liked Silver Jews was total. In my mind, even a local band with 20 fans had more unqualified support.
I heard Springsteen was an unhappy person. I don't know, I haven't read his biography. But a lot of people in my field should be a lot more unhappy than they are.
I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.
...and my signature is drawn in magic markeron the lower right hand corner of the windowso when something passes in the darkit's captured for a moment inside my work.
It must be very strange to live in the world of Willie Nelson or Bruce Springsteen or Pearl Jam. I don't know what kind of handle they have on their own loss of talent.
I was much further along as a poet than as a songwriter, but the songs were getting more attention. They were doing what art is supposed to do, mixing it up with people.
Yeah, once the song is written, it just complexifies the profile of it to have the music and the words at odds. It comes naturally to me. A lot of my music is like that.
Intellectuals and creative people, once they start talking about God they get put into this other category: 'I don't go to people's music like that to understand my life.'
I've never been a big movie person, but I used to watch movies regularly in my life, and sometime in the '90s I just stopped. I certainly never was an educated moviegover.
There is a person whose acquaintance and conversation I do earnestly recommend unto you as thing of the greatest advantage: you will be surprised when I tell you it is yourself.
Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.
I think reporters think that they can get something extra out of a person face-to-face, but in reality people just give stock answers because there's a social situation going on.
Some nights I'm funny with the between-song commentary, some nights I'm not. I have no control over this. I pace the stage a lot and struggle with the mic stand in a ridiculous way.
My whole life I've tried to find the thing I can do that other people can't do, and invest in that, and the one thing I can do is write narratives and build characters. I can do that.
Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.
That's the way I've always been, between the albums: For two- or three-year gaps I wouldn't pick up a guitar. And when I don't pick up a guitar for a year or two, that's when the songs fall out.
It frustrated me at college that all the acts in the Top 10 were like The Moody Blues and Phil Collins. It was like why did we get stuck with the last generation's music, why can't we have our own?
I bought a guitar when I was twenty. But I didn't write a song until I was 25 or 26. I never learned to play others songs. I learned to play my own songs while I was learning how to make them better.
In an email... like I did 100 interviews, and I never repeated one story. That's impossible to do when you do face-to-face interviews, because your brain locks and you say the same thing over and over again.
The songs of mine that don't work, the ones that I wouldn't consider playing live for instance, fail to integrate their idiosyncracies. It's not that they fail because they're boring, but because they overreach.
A lot of the Jews I met in Israel, almost all of them are secular. They get turned off by their religion, in the same way that Americans get turned off Christianity by people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.
I am not only neither Christian nor Jewish, but said to be in between, and I feel the same way about being from the South and being from the North. I write with my left hand but I throw a ball with my right hand.
I still believe in putting something out and not asking people to buy the record, then buy a ticket to my show and then buy a t-shirt and then a, like, copy of the show they just saw on CD. That's undignified to me.
Unless we take care to clear the first principles of knowledge from the incumbrance and delusion of words, we may make infinite reasonings upon them to no purpose. We may deduce consequences, and never be the wiser.
I take pride in the fact that I can walk away from things. My willingness to walk away has protected me, I realize that now. Being able to walk away from sessions, from poetry, from dreams of being a poetry professor.
I've never been from a certain group. I've always reserved a space for myself where I'm unattached to any group, but the part of Judaism that I really take away, that means something to me, is the part about community.
It's a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers' expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.
I mean, I wasn't fortunate enough to have ever experienced starting out with a band and sticking with them, so that would be interesting to me. People whose bands start out like that, when they break up it's always terrible.
Over 95% of the designers who have ever lived are alive today. Together, we have the power to define what professionalism in the communications industry will be about: helping increase market share or helping repair the World.
We visual communicators have so much good to share: rather than sharing our chemical and style addictions, we could be using our professional skills to help communicate health information, conflict resolution, democracy, technology.
I've had to stop going to the nearest grocery store that seems to play Shania Twain's 'Forever and For Always' whenever I'm there. It's hard to shop for frozen entrees through cold-air blasted tears. Feels good on a flushed face though.
In the beginning, it was meant to be like a faceless art piece. Then I did the first record and it received enough notice to satisfy my needs. I questioned the procedure out of fear. The Silver Jews was never meant to be recreated live.
In the beginning, because of the Pavement thing, we were able to sell a certain amount of records. We were able to sell not such a great amount of records, but enough to live on. So there was no incentive to do what didn't come naturally.
Spend regularly and constantly two or three hours of the morning in study and retirement. I do not take upon me to prescribe what you shall employ yourself about. I only propose the passing two or three hours of the twenty-four in private.
When you can't see you become very timid about space and moving. You become less aggressive and less tenacious. Lots of things that shouldn't be affected by vision really are. And you don't even know what they are until they become unstuck.
For it oft happens that a notion, when it is cloathed with words, seems tedious and operose and hard to be conceived, which yet being striped of that garniture, the ideas shrink into a narrow compass, and are viewed almost by one glance of thought.
I made records for 20 years, I lived off it. But people would say I made so many mistakes, I did so many things you're not supposed to do. I had a band name nobody could say. I didn't play live. I never practiced, I never got better at my instrument.
For Berkeley (normal) vision is a language whereby God tells us about the tangible world. But prior to having experience of the tangible world, the visual language would be as meaningless as an utterly alien language. It would convey no meaning to the sighted mind.
Designers must educate the public that design is about strategy, not decoration. However, such attempts are repeatedly undermined by a design world hooked on competitions and awards ceremonies that celebrate creativity instead of strategy results and sustainability.